UN Experts say US owes Blacks Reparations for Slavery

GENEVA, Switzerland, October 5:– CARICOM’s call for Reparations from Britain and Europe for Slavery and Native genocide got a boost this week after a United Nations (UN) panel of experts United Nations experts said the United States should give African Americans reparations for slavery.

In the heat of a US presidential election campaign in which racial rhetoric is growing louder, the Geneva-based UN Working Group on People of African Descent warned that the USA had not yet confronted its legacy of “racial terrorism” and that Americans of African descent were facing a “human rights crisis”.

The UN Working Group said in a statement to the press in Geneva last week that this “human rights crisis” in the US “has largely been fuelled by impunity for police officers who have killed a series of black men — many of them unarmed – across the country in recent months.”

The group said in a September 27 statement that those killings “and the trauma they create, are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynchings,” in the report, which was presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday.

“There has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” the report said.

Working group chairman Ricardo A Sunga told reporters in Geneva that the panel believed several models of reparations could work in the US context, including “elements of apology” and a form of “debt relief” to the descendants of enslaved people.

The UN working group visited the several US states in January before producing their final report, which is expected to be widely welcomed by CARICOM, which is itself pursuing Reparations from Britain and other EU member-states that benefitted from Slavery in the Caribbean.

The US Congressional Black Caucus has been liaising with the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) with a view to adopting the CARICOM template to officially demand Reparations on Capitol Hill in Washington.

CRC Chairman Sir Hilary Beckles also last year addressed the British House of Commons, ahead of his exchange with the US Black Caucus regarding their Reparations plans for Americans of African Descent.

Sir Hilary more recently visited Africa to explain the CARICOM Reparations approach, meeting with officials of The Gambia and the African Union (AU).

The UN Working Group’s Report is expected to be welcomed by the CARICOM Secretariat, the CRC and National Reparations Committees (NRCs) in 12 CARICOM member-states. (The Diplomatic Courier)

4 Comments

SLUborn

Boujon Guiyave

A fair and reasonable demand. I think the PM should voice his unwavering support for this cause. People of African decent remain the largest group that have been wronged and yet to get any apology or reparation as a victim.

Boujon Guiyave

T: we are still begging for bread in spite of slavery. What I am not too sure of is whether there would the need to fund mama Africa and Haiti. In fact I’m not sure there would have been a negro Haiti. The existence of an African-American is questionable. Besides who says these bigger the territories would have the capacity fund poor island states. Remember they made their wealth on the backs of slave labour, slave trade, looting and piracy.

You are one of those who like the idiot Josie believes slavery was a necessary evil. None of us know what the world would have been like had there been no African slavery. We therefore can’t talk about things we don’t know. But I can ask why didn’t they enslave their own kind? They had the numbers and presumably also the expertise.

You ask what do they owe us?: all victims of holocausts have received some kind of reward in the end. The Jews were rewarded with a home land whether you look at from the context of world history or in the context of divine intervention as recorded in the bible. But then I will not equate these two events. African slaves and their descendants were deliberately and systematically robbed of who they are – their essence. Up to this day descendants of these displaced people are having a hard time having a dignified existence. The protagonists are still the same.

More than anything they owe us our dignity. No amount of money can bring that back. In this respect you are right. But at least they can recognise and acknowledge their wrong doings. That more than anything is required if we are to move on as the two distinct peoples we are. As a therapy this has become a necessity!